The Emotional Importance of Objects

I've written before about the emotional significance of things that once belonged to our deceased loved ones. I was reflecting on why certain ones are more important that others and I think symbolically, the ones that we associate with them due to our memories are the hardest ones to part with...if we ever do.

There are some of Leif's things that I don't use or see every day that I can't bring myself to part with; his photo albums, his wallet, his army uniforms and dog tags, for instance. There are also things I use every day that I don't want to lose.

A couple of times in the past few months I've been saddened to think I'd have to get a new cell phone. The one I have is almost five years old and it needed a new battery and had some sound problems. I didn't want to let it go because Leif chose it for me and brought it to me in July 2007 in a cute gift bag from t-Mobile. Although I paid for it, it was yet another example of Leif's importance in helping us with the technology of our lives. The phone I had before that had poor reception at our house, and he knew this one would be better.

I didn't want a new phone because this one I associated with Leif, but not just because he brought it to me. It was the phone on which we had so many text exchanges, sometimes whole conversations. Every day after I went swimming, I would check this phone for messages from him, and most days, it seemed, there was one. Often in the evenings he would send me messages and we'd talk about anything from politics to what was going on in our lives. I still have the last messages from him on the phone. I don't ever want to take them off. He's not there, but his last text messages are.

Leif had one of the first generation iPhones, always the one to adopt new technology. He loved it, and when he died, it was valuable for me to use the contacts he had on it for notifications to friends, his employer, and others I would otherwise not have known how to contact. I didn't want to switch carriers and pay the monthly data fees to use it as a phone, so I terminated his account and continued to use it as an iPod Touch for over three years. It was somehow a comfort to me to have it, hold it, use it.

Then one day not long ago, it froze. I couldn't get it to work no matter what I did. So I "restored" it to factory settings, thinking I could then restore the contents from a backup, but it didn't work. Then Peter dropped it on the metal rail of our bed and cracked the screen. I took it to the "Genius Bar" at the Apple Store to ask how I could get it working again. They said it was useless, in common parlance, "bricked."

I know it won't work forever, but it made me really sad to lose the use of it. I was determined to make it function again. My nephew, Rick, encouraged me to try jailbreaking it to see if that would help. Since it was long past warranty, I decided to try it. The results were frustrating. It would now at least get to the opening screen, but I couldn't get it to do anything further. My niece, Brenda, figured out that if you made screen input fast enough, you could get it to do one thing more . . . and if you were really fast, maybe a few more steps. We tried a lot of things and finally it worked for a few fast steps before freezing. Then the only way to make it work was to turn it off and back on again. Not satisfactory.

I couldn't help but wonder what Leif would have thought of to try, whether he would have had it working again in a couple of hours. I spent many hours over many days, determined but losing hope. I still don't really know what made the difference, but it's working quite well now, although it's anyone's guess how long. I'm glad. It makes me feel better, somehow, that it's working and that I can use it. It seems a little silly how something this small can make me feel a connection that really isn't there.

At his last birthday celebration on January 27, 2008, I took a couple of photos of him talking on his iPhone. I think he was taking to Justin about how to install a newer version of the Mac OS on the laptop he'd bought used from Justin. I was wishing he was paying more attention to us than his techie toys, but he was engrossed, so I took pictures. Today I decided to make the opening screen on his iPhone be one of those photos. The first photo is the unlock screen, which shows the photo in an app that gives a contact phone number in case I lose the phone and someone responsible and kind wants to return it (I removed the number for posting on this blog) and the second is just the photo alone.

There's something good about having this photo on his phone. Something that brings back memories of a good birthday evening spent together. Something that shows him using the phone I now hold in my hand, even with it's screen cracked in a spider web pattern in the upper right.

Tomorrow it will be four years since we last saw Leif alive. On April 10 it will be four years since we found him dead. It still seems as though I should expect him to come riding up to our door and take this phone out of his pocket to check his messages. I want him to.

Leif with His Aunt Sherie - November 1975 - Manhattan, Kansas - Age 10 months

Because Peter W. was in the army and we spent so many years of our children's childhoods overseas, they didn't always have a chance to get to know their extended family. When Leif was born we were living in Manhattan, Kansas, which was still pretty far away from most of them, but we did get a chance to see each other. In November 1975 and again in July 1976, my sister Sherie came to visit from Michigan. This photo of her with Leif in November 1975 when he was ten months old was taken with her camera. I think I took it. It's beautiful of Sherie and Leif looks like such a jolly little guy, playful and huggable.

We got to see Sherie and DeWayne the following year when we lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, but then not for three years while we were in Germany. Then another five years while we were in Japan and Hawaii, but when we moved to Fort Sheridan, Illinois north of Chicago, we were only about two-and-a-half hours drive away from Sherie for four years and we were able to visit back and forth. Leif got to know his aunt and uncle and his first cousins, Shane, Brenda and Derek, and really enjoyed them. He was older than they were, but he was always great with younger kids and they had a lot of fun together.

When we moved from Chicago to Puerto Rico, we were separated again for two years, and once we were back in Kansas with 700 miles between us, didn't see each other as often as we would have liked, but Brenda came to visit us on her own by then, too.

Leif & Holly - Fort Sheridan, Illinois - July 1987 - Age 12

Our sons grew up without the frequent closeness of our extended families except for some brief periods.

Peter A. got to spend quite a bit of time with his dad's aunts, uncles and cousins in Germany starting when he was 6 months old until he was 4 and a half years old.

Then there was a short time when we were back in Manhattan, Kansas that he was around my mother and my brother, Donovan and his family (cousins Rick and Holly; Tim wasn't born yet), but we left when he was only seven and Leif was just a year and half.

We were close to Lannay for a year when the boys were 2 and 8, but her daughters weren't born yet.

We also had the four years at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, when we were a few hours away from my sister, Sherie, and her family in Michigan, with cousins Shane, Brenda and Derek. Peter A. was only there for his senior year of high school and then back for Christmases, but Leif had time with his cousins the whole four years.

Then Leif spent more time with my mother and my brother Donovan's family when he was a senior in high school and a couple of years of college back in Manhattan, Kansas. By that time, Rick had left for service in the navy, but he saw quite a bit of Holly and Tim.

Otherwise, were were far, far away from our extended families, so our sons didn't grow up with a continuous sense of larger family and we traded that experience for the travel and life in Germany, Japan, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

However, Leif always enjoyed his cousins, and I think he if he'd had the chance, he would have spent a lot more time with them. They had a lot of interests and ideas in common.

He did have a chance to spend more time with his cousin Holly during two of the summers we lived at Fort Sheridan. Donovan sent her to stay with us for a few weeks each time and we had a good time together. We visited all the museums, downtown Chicago, and lots more.

You can see how Leif was starting to shoot up in height like a beanpole here. That year he was a gangly kid at the age of 12 and by the time he was 13, he was 6' 1" tall and shaving! It must have been an incredible transformation for him, but he took it in stride.

Leif's 12th Christmas 1986 - Lawton, Michigan - Almost 12 years old

In the summer of 1986 we moved from Honolulu, Hawaii to Fort Sheridan, Illinois, a small army base on the north side of Chicago sandwiched in between the suburbs of Highland Park, Highwood and Lake Forest. Peter W. was actually assigned as the Staff Judge Advocate for the U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command (MEPCOM) at Great Lakes, a few miles farther north. We could have gotten quarters there, or lived in any of a large number of the northern suburbs, but after a thorough investigation of the schools, it was clear that the best place for our sons to go to school was in Highland Park, and accepting quarters at Fort Sheridan would put them into that school system. For Peter Anthony, it was a critical senior year, but for Leif, we knew it would be at least three years, and it turned out to be four.

Our sons had grown up so far away from my family for most of their lives that they really only knew my mother, who came to visit at least once a year wherever we lived. Moving to the Chicago area brought us closer to them, because my mother and my brother Donovan were a day's drive away in Kansas; my sister Lannay was a day's drive away in Maryland, and my sister Sherie was just a couple of hours drive away in Michigan. We were able to see them a lot more again and Leif took to his cousins very quickly.

1986 was the first Christmas on the US mainland since 1976, ten years! We spent it at my sister Sherie's home in Lawton, Michigan, and my sister Lannay and her family came, too. It was great to have a house full of family to celebrate with, and Peter Anthony and Leif got to know four of their first cousins. In the photo above, left to right are Peter Anthony (18), Derek, Leif (almost 12), Shane, Jacquie and Brenda. It was Peter Anthony's 18th birthday, my Christmas boy born on December 25th.

Christmas in the north, cold and snowy, seemed more like what we were culturally used to as Christmas weather, but it was a shock after three years in warm Hawaii!